It was late in the trimester. A few of us were sitting on our universityās library lawn drinking coffee, chatting about the world. One of our colleagues, an experienced fieldworker, approached, bustling anxiously. They looked stressed, their fast-paced walk shackled by a burden that needed to be released. They had been looking for us. They had no time for niceties. There were no greetings. When a story begins without pleasantries, you know to shut up and listen.
Their book was due at the publishers in two days, and they were panicking. They laid out their reasons, their fears. They were writing about some heavy violence, a rough and tumble world they had worked so hard to get access to. It had nearly broken them. But they had prevailed, sort of. They now had these deep and confronting stories about life on the streets in some place, somewhere, emancipating a whole collection of visceral lived experiences. Another facet of our human complexities to be brought to a new audience. But this was a brutal space to be writing aboutāwhere recriminations were vicious and swift. And their work, their book, was full of intensely personal encounters, with identities that needed to be protected. Had they de-identified enough? What if someone could work out who the characters were? What if someone gets beaten up, or worse, dies because of this book? For the next two hours, we heard their concerns. We listened. And, in return, we offered insights from our own work, our own research, our own time in the field. Because we understood, we empathised, and we sympathised with their plight. Because we knew what they knew: fieldwork never ends. The risk is on-going, well after your body has left the space.
This edited collection came to life in that moment. It was born from a desire to share stories about fieldwork, stories that transcend disciplines and the rigidity, formality, and constraint of journal articles. We wanted fieldworkers to have a new body of work to mine, to learn from, and to enact in the field.
We didnāt give our colleague advice. We didnāt tell them what they should do. We gave them our stories, so that they could make their own decisions. And that is our hope with this book. This is a collection of first-person narratives that explore the physical, emotional, and psychological manifestations, and consequences, of risk and fieldwork; where risk and fieldwork are variably embodied, experienced, and conceived.
The authors of these chapters are all academics who benefit from privilege in myriad ways. But a personal privilege, a luxury we all share, is that we get to have these amazing conversations about fieldwork with our colleagues; in the corridors, in meetings, and at the pub. We have discussions across disciplines, across demarcated fields of study, sharing familiar and unfamiliar methodologies, locations, and research paradigms. All of the contributors to this book have also, at one stage, shared a physical space, a geographical location of employment, the University of New South Wales, Sydney. And through a web of interactions, fleeting moments here, longer moments there, we have shared our fieldwork experiences. This edited collection animates these discussions. It captures fragments of these conversations but reconstitutes them in a particular form; as candid, vulnerable, and inviting narratives.
Why Risk?
We know that undertaking field research can be a risky and dangerous enterprise. A long list of ethnographies from sociology, anthropology, development studies, peace studies and, more recently, criminology corroborate this claim (for example, see Apoifis 2017; Bourgois 1995; Ferrell 1996; Ferrell and Hamm 1998; Hobbs 1988; Hobbs et al. 2003; Jacobs 1998; Knott 2019; Lee-Treweek and Linkogle 2000; Lyng 1990; Sanchez-Jankowski 1990; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Shesterinina 2019; Wadds 2020; Whyte 1943; Westmarland 2001; Winlow 2001). Conducting and producing field research presents particular risks that require careful navigation. In these spaces, the line between safety and danger can be crossed in quick time, often with little warning.
These risks manifest in diverse and novel ways. They can be physical and psychological, ephemeral and enduring. They can impact the researchers, participants, collaborators, and interviewees. They can affect our families, our work life, our reputations, and our employment. Indeed, they can condition the very foundation of our processes of knowledge production.
Field research is also intrusive. It is transformative. It can alter lives and communities. When done well, it enables the telling of powerful and important stories. It can give public voice to those who are deliberately marginalised. It can speak truth to power. When done poorly, however, it can be extractive and destructive, entrenching oppression and subjugation. Fieldwork, in any context, is no small-stakes game.
But What Is Risk, and How Is It Conceived?
The social sciences demand definitions. āRiskā needs to be put into a box: disciplinarily siloed, categorised, and necessarily restricted. Controversially perhaps, as editors, we have deliberately resisted such protocols. We donāt define āriskā (and we certainly donāt define āthe fieldā). The purpose of this collection is to transcend these boundaries that limit our conceptualisation and engagement with risk and fieldwork. We encouraged our contributors to play with the idea of risk, to bring to the fore their unique and diverse understandings of what risk means to them. In doing so, we believe readers will be better equipped to deal with the intricacies and uncertainty of everything that field research entails.
Collated, curated, and presented in this form, these diverse and idiosyncratic narratives from across the social sciences showcase first-hand stories of danger, risk, and reward. Not simply an edited book about risk in the field, this collection offers an arsenal of practical examples where fieldworkers have attempted to negotiate these complexities.
And we need these stories.
Given the nature of our work, given the fact that we are dealing with systems of power, people, and places that are in constant flux, we need to continually adapt. We need to be perpetually learning. And it is through the sharing of storiesāthese vivid and immersive narrativesāthat we can begin to prepare for the risks that are ubiquitous to all fieldworkers. That is one of the purposes of this edited collection.
But we have to be honest. There is another reason. This is a resistance piece. We cannot speak about risk without speaking about ethics. And we cannot speak about ethics without speaking about the existential threat to embodied qualitative research coming from university ethics committees. This is serious business for us. We are worried. Our research is increasingly misunderstood and constrained by onerous and overbearing institutional demands. We are under attack. And we return to explore these sentiments in the epilogue.
With all of that in mind, we knew we wanted an edited collection from an inter-disciplinary group of researchers who had conducted fieldwork in a diverse range of intense research settings. We knew we wanted to ask them about risk. We knew we wanted them to move beyond clinical and clichƩd responses. We wanted to challenge them to more deeply reflect on the risks they had faced, that they continue to face. And so, we chose to interview field researchers. After all, this is what we do.
Getting the Stories
For each chapter, two of the editors spoke at length with each of the chapter authors about their own fieldwork. The idea behind this was to have field researchers interviewing field researchers. We needed the authors to open up, to relax into the space, and to make themselves vulnerable. So we deployed our craft.
As interviewers, we used our shared knowledge, our familiarity and empathy with the contributors to build rapport. We listened to their stories. We chatted like old friends, and when needed, we pushed; we pushed to draw out the richness of these encounters, to uncover practices often normalised and made unexceptional through years of experience. This not only gave an energy to each interview, it fostered deeper reflections and more poignant responses.
Each interview went for between one and two hours. We spoke about risk in multiple forms. We asked about āpersonal riskā, like risks associated with physical harm, and the psychological toll and moral strain associated with researching particular groups or topics.
We discussed the diffusion of risks to others: our partners, our participants, our collaborators, and those peripherally connected to research projects. We talked about the complexity of working across cultures and languages and in spaces where customs are unfamiliar. We spoke about the cha...